Cinematographer Mark Carroll takes us up in a crane to show us how he was able to capture feeding and caching behavior at the Acorn Woodpecker’s eyeview at the Hastings Natural History preserve in Carmel California.
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TRANSCRIPT
- Hi, I'm Mark Carroll, I'm part of the film team, here in beautiful California and we're filming acorn woodpeckers.
(woodpeckers squawking) Today in particular, I'm trying to film some of the granary activity, where the acorn woodpeckers will take the acorn, pull it out of the hole, one hole that they've created, and put it into one of a thousand other holes.
But a lot of the activity is happening higher up, than what we can cover on the ground.
So our solution has been to utilize a lift to get the camera a lot higher up into this tree in particular, back here.
(lift clanking) (lift motor roaring) So once I'm up and settled, you can hear the birds are actually nearby.
They're calling right now.
And they'll probably come in, even though I'm only about 10 or 15 feet away.
But just to make sure, I go ahead and put some camo over top of the camera, and then just a little something on myself too.
All right, now that we're all set, let me take you in here and show you.
So that's how close we can get now.
And now, it's just a waiting game with the birds.
It could be a while.
(woodpeckers squawking) (woodpeckers pecking) (camo rustling)
